Why we need “Other Minds” in the Tech Industry

Diversity in Demographics and Specialties

People are becoming increasingly aware that since 2014, major tech companies such as Apple and Google have released diversity reports of their company demographics, which — to our shock but also in line with prior expectations — were not at all diverse. These reports from major companies showed a huge display of primarily White or Asian, cis-male engineers. This began to reveal more evidently the unfortunately expected lack of ethnic and gender diversity that we would hope for in companies that are creating products that shape our everyday lives. Since 2014, we would hope to see drastic changes to this, but there have been minimal changes to their hiring demographics since. From this, we see that not only is it a more systemic, societal issue, but tech companies are also struggling with “culture-wars” and lawsuits because of demographic biases at shareholder meetings and with public representation.

Silicon Valley generally has been plagued with systemic lack of diversity in their workforce and unconscious bias in their hiring and product testing. Part if this has been pegged to the fact that as Harvard Business Review stated, “Startups don’t have time for diversity.” When hiring or trying to put a product together as they attempt to “beat the clock” before the market…